Biography on jonathan safran foer book review
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Here I Am is 500+ pages and it took me about half of that to begin enjoying the novel. Having read Foer’s work before, I was sure my commitment would pay off. At the same time, my expectations of Foer’s work led to some initial disappointment with Here I Am.
Foer’s two previous novels, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated both featured strong, unique, and often hilarious narrators. Here I Am has a far more subdued narration, a more withdrawn, third person perspective. It was harder to feel engaged in the story, added to the fact that this isn’t exactly an action-filled novel.
The book focuses on four generations of the Bloch family in Washington, D.C. Isaac is a Holocaust survivor, about to move into a Jewish retirement home. Irving is a hard-nosed, controversial political commentator. Jacob – the primary focus of the novel – is mid-forties, nominally-religious, on the cusp of trying to make his marriage work or giving up entirely. Sam is thirteen, preparing for his bar mitzvah, which is in danger of being permanently cancelled. These four men bounce off each other, argue, are affectionate and hateful in equal measure. Then, tossed into the mix of regular life and conflict, a massive earthquake hits
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Book Review // Here I Am unreceptive Jonathan Safran Foer
By Moment | Sep 06, 2016
Here I Am
Jonathan Safran Foer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2016, pp. 592, $28.00
The Divorce Plot
by Geraldine Brooks
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The last Jonathan Safran Foer book I will ever read. #CBRBingo – Nostalgia
I picked this book up because a) I’ve owned it forever and pandemic reading has meant trying hard to find books off my own shelves. I’ve owned this for oh, about thirteen years? Back when I still thought I had to read books other people thought were “good” and “important.” And b) because of CBR Bingo, in which the Nostalgia square meant finding a book set during the time in which I was in high school. I had a surprisingly hard time finding books to fit this description, and none other than this one I already owned. So! This book it was. And it was fine.
I’m just really skeptical of Jonathan Safran Foer*. It says a lot that I haven’t read anything of his since the first book I tried (Everything is Illuminated, back in 2010), and even as I gave that book four stars, my Goodreads review of it says, “I feel like what this book is telling me is that Jonathan Safran Foer is a good writer, and he knows it.”(I would not have given it four stars today.) That feeling has only intensified. In my opinion, this book (and his writing in general) is a constant mesh of his need to be clever and impressive getting in the way of actual meaning.
*I ca